The Chair of the Canadian Pork Council says the confidence Japanese customers have in the quality of Canadian pork combined with greater freedom to move product into that country creates new opportunities for growth in that market.
Last month, in recognition of Canada and Japan's participation in the Comprehensive Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership, a delegation representing the Canadian pork sector travelled to Japan.
Rick Bergmann, the Chair of the Canadian Pork Council, told those on hand last week for Manitoba Pork's 2018 Annual General Meeting Japan has extremely high standards for pork focusing on the firmness of the meat, the color of the meat and what goes into the production of the meat on farm.

Clip-Rick Bergmann-Canadian Pork Council:
It was to celebrate the TPP, the success of the TPP and the target mission was also to understand more of what our customers are requiring because we want to ensure that we are providing what they are looking for.
We also met our federal Minister of Agriculture Lawrence MacAulay there.
We had opportunity to have meetings with the Japanese meat importers to talk about continued business and increased business from country to country.
Japan dose have a domestic production.
As time goes on, what we've seen in the past decade, their production is decreasing primarily because of the costs of production.
That gives Canadian pork producers a great opportunity to fulfill more of the upcoming needs for pork protein into Japan.

Bergmann says the big question among Japanese importers was can the Canadian pork sector produce enough product to supply the demand so that's the challenge for Canadian producers.
He says the signing of the CPTPP in Chile on March 8th gives us tremendous optimism that our future will be one of growth and prosperity and will also benefit the Canadian economy.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.